California Cookbook

Spiced cherry and blueberry upside-down cake

Kirk McKoy / Los Angeles Times

By Sarah Karnasiewicz | Aug. 12, 2010

The iconic upside-down cake of the American imagination is a golden sponge gilded with a slick of caramel, a corona of sweetened pineapple rings and incandescent maraschino cherries. Yet as sunshiny as it may seem, it hardly qualifies as a ...
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Step 2In a large 10- to 12-inch skillet, preferably cast iron, melt the 3 tablespoons of butter over medium heat. Add the brown sugar and stir until dissolved, about 1 minute. Add three-fourths each of the cherries and blueberries to the skillet, along with the ginger, and stir gently so that they are evenly coated with the butter and sugar. Add the water, cover the pan, and cook until the cherries and berries have also released their juices, about 3 minutes. Uncover and cook down over medium heat, stirring occasionally, until the mixture is thick, sticky and jammy, about 5 minutes. Toss in the remaining halved cherries and blueberries and stir to combine. If you are baking the cake in the skillet, set the whole thing aside to cool. If you will be baking the cake in a springform pan, scrape the cherry and berry mixture into a 9-inch round pan (line the base with parchment paper, to about one-half inch up the sides of the pan). Take care that the mixture is evenly spread to the edges of the pan.

Step 3In a medium bowl, whisk together the flour, sugar, baking soda, baking powder, salt, cinnamon, nutmeg, allspice and cardamom. In a separate, large bowl stir together the buttermilk and the remaining one-half cup melted butter. Then, working in batches, sift the dry ingredients into the wet ingredients, mixing gently, until just smooth and combined.

Step 4Pour the cake batter into the pan, over the cherry and berry layer; gently smooth the batter to the edges of the pan using a knife. Bake the cake until dark golden and a toothpick inserted into the center comes out clean, about 40 minutes (a springform cake will require additional time). Allow it to cool for 10 minutes, and then run a knife around the edges of the cake to loosen it, and turn the cake over onto a large platter. (If using a springform, place a plate over the pan, flip the pan over, release the spring mold, and peel back the parchment.) The cake will be best on the day that it is made. Serve it slightly warm or at room temperature.

The iconic upside-down cake of the American imagination is a golden sponge gilded with a slick of caramel, a corona of sweetened pineapple rings and incandescent maraschino cherries. Yet as sunshiny as it may seem, it hardly qualifies as a seasonal treat since, in traditional recipes, anyway, its crowning glory comes straight from an aluminum can.

So what's an upside-down cake fiend to do in high summer, when market stalls burst with succulent plums, tart cherries, perfumed peaches and plump apricots, and it feels downright criminal not to capitalize on such bounty? Put your nostalgic attachments aside and improvise.

Channel those cake cravings into variations on the theme that retain the idiot-proof ease and sweetness of the original, yet take inspiration not from Dole but from the summer's avalanche of amazing fruit.

That's what I've been doing since June, anyway, when a spur-of-the-moment trip through the farmers market left me with pounds of rhubarb but not even a smidgen of energy to start in on a pie crust. Instead, I chopped the pink stalks into rough chunks and dropped them -- along with a heaping cup of brown sugar, a fat knob of butter and a crushed inch or two of fresh ginger -- into my biggest cast-iron pan. I stirred and simmered and reduced until all that remained was a layer of tart, jammy compote. Then, riffing off that flash of ginger, I mixed up a spartan gingerbread batter and spread it on top. Not 40 minutes later (and with a deft inversion of the pan, of course) I had a grown-up upside-down cake that was equally at home as an accompaniment to my morning coffee as it was with a scoop of vanilla ice cream after dinner.

Happily, since that success, inspiration has appeared everywhere. A pint of cherries? They practically begged for the company of almond cake. A basket of blueberries? I let the quintessential muffin be my guide and paired them with a cinnamon crumb. The concept of the upside-down cake, after all, doesn't exactly demand kitchen wizardry.

Undoubtedly one of the reasons it has remained a staple in the home cook's repertoire all these years is that the only gear it requires is a mixing bowl, a skillet and a working oven. Even on hot summer days, you'll barely break a sweat. No fuss, no muss -- and hardly any dirty dishes. Just deliciousness.

Indeed, affection for upside-down cakes knows no national boundaries.

The beloved tartes Tatins of France are close cousins, with wide slices of apples caramelized in brown sugar and butter in a copper pan, nestled in a buttery puff-pastry crust and baked. And in Brazil, a bolo de banana -- a tropical version of the cake lined with long slices of ripe banana -- is a staple in bakeries from Sao Paulo to Salvador.

Let's experiment

Clearly, the appeal of the upside-down cake to eaters is well established. But start making them and you'll soon discover the allure for cooks is equally evident: After one masters the basic recipe -- a warmed pan of brown sugar and butter caramel is piled first with fruit and then a cake batter, before being baked and inverted -- the permutations are nearly endless.

In fact, in the course of my experiments these last few weeks, my strategy has been to brainstorm classic flavor pairings and then try to translate them into cake form.

Fragrant peaches were tossed in honeyed syrup and found a love match with a crumbly cake spiked with a generous jigger of dark rum. Mangoes cozied up with piles of unsweetened coconut flakes and a blanket of dense golden sponge enriched with coconut milk. And apricots sliced into crescents and drizzled with caramel formed a perfect mosaic atop a rustic cornmeal cake perfumed with orange flower water.

Which is not to say there weren't missteps. While the two make grand companions in so many other culinary iterations, the fudgy chocolate cake I rimmed with sweet cherries emerged from the pan a muddy mess. The hitch? Ultimately the decadent cake, while delicious on its own, entirely masked the subtle bite of the cherries.

Still, every error leads to a lesson learned, so added to my upside-down improviser's handbook is this: When it comes to designing your amalgamation of fruit and crumb, always err on the side of letting the fruit star. And tart varieties that have a little extra acidity, like nectarines, blueberries, plums -- or even, in winter, lemons -- seem to wear their caramel coat especially well.

Avoid skimping

Another entry in the improviser's handbook: Keep an eye on proportion.

Whether you choose peaches or apples, they'll shrink considerably while baking -- so skimp at your peril. My tack is to layer and then layer some more, the goal being a nearly even ratio of crumbly cake to jammy fruit. An extra-wide cast-iron skillet (10 inches at a minimum) has long been the traditional vessel for an upside-down cake -- perhaps because even early cooks realized the aesthetic appeal of a well-proportioned specimen, and the wider the diameter of the pan, the shallower the cake.

But ultimately, to sweat over an inch or two of pan size would be contrary to the sweet, forgiving spirit of this American classic. The truth is that perfectly delicious versions of the upside-down cake can be achieved with a battery of other kitchen tools, like a 9-inch round or springform pan. (Though, of course, the need to prepare the caramel on the stovetop in a separate skillet adds significantly to the dirty-dish tally.)

Still, for klutzy cooks, the extra housework may be worth it: Springform pans transform the sometimes scary (think molten caramel, searing metal) task of inverting the cake into a cinch -- simply place a platter on top, flip, release the pan's spring and remove the sides.

The trade-off is that the seams in the pan also love to shed rivers of sticky caramel syrup -- so unless you want to spend the remainder of the summer scrubbing your oven, don't even think about turning on the gas without first placing the pan over a baking sheet.

After it's done, however, the only work left to do is wait. Designed for nibbling, an upside-down cake is at its best at room temperature and, like all fresh things, on the day it's made. But that's hardly a hitch. After all, drenched in caramel, tempting and full of summer sunshine, these are treats whose life spans would be best measured in minutes, not hours.